How to Help Your Parents Downsize the Family Home

The idea of your parents downsizing their home for retirement can be an exhilarating concept and a source of great anxiety for both you and your parents. Saying goodbye to a family home isn’t easy, but moving into a new place with fewer responsibilities will likely be freeing and relaxing for them once the process is complete.

There are many reasons and conditions that lead someone to downsize, and this article focuses on those situations when it is voluntary, planned, and not done under duress. I’m assuming that your folks have time—maybe six months or a year, or more—to go through their belongings and decide what they want to take with them for a move and what will be done with the things they don’t want to bring along.

One of the first things to know is that they don’t have to go through this process on their own. The National Association of Senior Move Managers can be a valuable resource for finding someone in your area who has helped others navigate this entire journey. There may also be free or low-cost resources available in your community through your senior center. And, as their children, you might also be interested in helping them go through the possessions in your childhood home. Beware, however, that you will bring with you emotions and perspectives that your parents may not be interested in nursing as they deal with their own goodbyes to the home. Your parents should be the ones to decide if they are okay with you lending a hand.

If you want to be involved, but don’t want to step on any toes, consider taking on auxiliary research assignments. For example, you can help identify local charities, types of donations those charities accept, and how and where your parents can make donations to those charities. You can also research how to properly dispose cleaning chemicals, old paint, and other materials that can’t be thrown away in the regular trash. Your parents will likely need a moving company to do the heavy lifting, and you can learn who the most trusted movers are and their availability. Also, if your parents have valuable items they don’t want to move and you and your siblings won’t want to move these items into your homes, you can research trusted appraisers in your area who can help with an estate sale.

If you want to be involved, but don’t want to step on any toes, consider taking on auxiliary research assignments.

Since your parents likely won’t be able to move every piece of furniture they own into their new space, they’ll want to come up with a method for deciding what to do with that extra furniture. A simple method for declaring which pieces of furniture will make the move and which ones won’t is to put a sticky note on the back of the item. At age 93, when my paternal grandmother left her large farmhouse for an apartment in the city (where she lived until she was 102), she placed hot pink sticky notes on the backs of the pieces that would move with her—her bed, her dresser, her vanity, her favorite piece of artwork, etc.—and then standard yellow sticky notes on everything else. My dad and his siblings were given a week to review the items and write their names on the yellow sticky notes if they wanted anything for their homes. If there were multiple names on a piece of furniture, my grandmother made the decision by circling the name on the sticky note of who she decided would get the book case or desk or whatever the object was. Then, my grandmother told her children they had two weeks, between X and Y dates, to come and pick up the furniture. She said if the items weren’t gone by Y date, a charity would get the items instead. It was a bold move on her part, but very effective for motivating her children and getting them to decide if they really wanted the furniture. You can gently suggest this or a similar tactic to your parents and maybe they’ll be on board.

Smaller, sentimental items are usually more difficult to process when downsizing. I recommend your parents go through all of their possessions, and acknowledge their relationship and history with the items. You might be able to help by taking pictures of the objects and writing notes in a journal as they share their stories. Or, you can also just listen. You might recommend they have a set number of boxes for things they definitely want to take with them, and try their best to funnel sentimental items down to only these boxes. Try not to rush them through this sorting process, if possible. Their things are just things, but they have been their things for a long time and giving them a respectable send-off will help make your parents’ move emotionally easier.

If your parents have more things they want than what they have room to store, I recommend they sort through their things multiple times with a week or two between each sorting. Most people find a second or third pass to be more helpful than making rash decisions during the first pass through their things. Also, since we form deeper connections to objects through touch, it may be beneficial to have you hold up the items for them as they make decisions. They will likely see the items more rationally and also enjoy your companionship.